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Comment by barrysteve | Hacker News Reader

Sabine likes to swing an axe into a tree. Her preaching gets tiresome fast though.

She redefines science to require simplicity, when it simply doesn't require it. Many solved or solveable problems in science are ghastly complex and computers improved or solved them. The LHC is a most-obvious example for that category. Do I even need to point out the counter-arguments or are we just taking Sabine at her word..

This thinking mirrors a cultural-faith shift and has little to do with the premise of the article, that we dont know and cant know the universe before the Big Bang.

A scientist who doesn't preach is worth their weight in gold, usually because they're too busy doing science to preach.

She is the red dressed woman on the Tiber River telling us how she won't let this stand anymore. Meanwhile the rest of us just get on with it. Accordingly saying this comment was a waste of time.

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> She redefines science to require simplicity, when it simply doesn't require it.

God wills the Universe into Being. I have explained everything completely. What qualities of a selection function do you have that would choose a different explanation?

One that doesn't require something more complex than the Universe to explain the Universe?

Well it's not so hard to break apart all the presuppositions in that sentence, but I know you're not looking for this.

Arguing tiber-river style divine simplicity is best left up to the dominican monk gregory pine and his debate partners.

You might be disappointed to discover I was making a practical point, not using the ideal-metaphorical language of sabine and her culture.

Practically speaking no matter where sabine and the concept of simplicity, teamwork and the coming relational tribalism goes, one can work on the ghost of the tree she is trying to chop down or drag an incomplete, complex part of science through the bubble of 'simplicity' out to disrupt the other side.

Put more briefly, no matter how simple we all agree 'it' is, you can disrupt that bubble with infinite complexity, just as easily as she cuts down trees.

Sabine, wearing her science communicator hat, necessarily has to simplify a lot. Everything of hers that I watch or read is simplified science (including her branded Brilliant course), and it has to be simplified for me to follow it because I'm a software engineer not a scientist and I can't yet do the tensor differential calculus of relativity nor the complex-valued calculus of quantum mechanics.

But even without that caveat, science has to be as simple as possible (and no simpler), because every extra equation or variable beyond the minimum is necessarily a worthless decoration adorning the core idea. Computers don't always let you brute force your way past that extra complexity, but even when they do, it never really helps to have it.

I mean gene unfolding, meterology, lhc, fusion, space research, ect have all been served tremendously by computing. Granted one could say they are temporarily less useful due to a local peak of optimization, buut that's a long way from throwing out all the sine waves and commiting to perfect metaphysics.

Take any or all of your examples, and add an extra variable:

   if (unix_time>>128) % 2 == 1 { explode(); }

Easy to code, unfalsifiable. Adds nothing to our understanding.

Who would do that? What does it prove to do that?

Describe a metaphysical house that could never exist. One with mc esher stairs and melted clocks everywhere.

Who would do that? What would it prove to do that?

Yes computers can be a waste of time.. what's your point? You want me to tell you how to improve science with computing to save you from simplicity, or should I just instead do it...

What did you mean by "simplicity" when you wrote:

> She redefines science to require simplicity, when it simply doesn't require it.

The point of my example is to show that you don't add unnecessary complexity if you don't need to. But if you think that weather and plasma physics are examples of "ghastly complex" things, you're not talking about the same category of complexity as the one every scientist will argue against.

It's the difference between saying "go is hard" because it took until AlphaGo to make an AI to play it well vs. "go is easy" because the rules fit on a matchbox in a normal font.

You're not adding the complexity, it's out there. One would hope we're aiming at modelling nature.

The human body is incredibly complex and making simple theories about it doesn't help so much. As you said, Go is incredibly complex and it took ML to tackle it.

ML is a good case, is it simple or is it complex? The ideas we use to communicate the program are simple enough. It's polynomial regression or it's a neural network. Understandable ideal simple terms, but what the program practically executes is much more complex.

Why ditch understanding what's going on under the hood so that we can live in the land of ideal simplicities? Those usually come last after you get what's going on and have refined your practicalities down.

We need better tools for everything and we're not going to get there by ignoring the practical and complex parts.

Sabine is happy to kill off looking at complexity because Penrose is hypothesizing about the nature of life under the guise of pre-big bang physics.

Okay I get her relationship to Penrose.. why do I have to stop exploring complexity again? Cause it's not divinely simple.. and/or because she said so?

But again I admit I waste my own time and maybe yours, we wont merge our views. The eagle never lost as much time as he did, talking to the raven.

As I say, you're using the words "complex" and "simple" in a fundamentally different way than Sabine (and most every scientist) is using them.

For science and scientists, it's the complexity/simplicity of the rules that matters.

You're arguing against a point Sabine doesn't make.

Yes I understand that, you missed the point. The rules are just an idealized form of something more complex.

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